This is a superb biography. Yet it begins in the most inauspicious place. It is 1964, and Saul Bellow has just become absurdly rich and famous. His struggle, doubt, grit, immigrant story, artistic dreams — all were told in Volume 1 of Zachary Leader’s biography, “To Fame and Fortune.” Here in Volume 2, “Love and Strife,” the novel “Herzog” is published on the very first page and reaches “No. 1 on the best-seller list, supplanting John le Carré’s ‘The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.’” Never again would Bellow, about to turn 50 years old, lack for wealth, power, awards or flunkies to stand by him, ready to take his coat and do his bidding. The temptation for someone in his position was to become an insufferable, spoiled monster.

And Bellow quickly gave in to temptation. “Bellow’s bad temper in the late ’60s was by no means directed exclusively at would-be biographers, radical students and aggrieved wives,” Leader begins a sentence, apologetically, on just Page 65. Bellow had so many targets to attack, whether insulting them face to face or in blistering letters or put-downs circulated through intermediaries. One of his favorite one-liners ran: “Let’s you and him fight.” The most salient recipients of Bellow’s bad temper in this biography were his three sons, each from a different mother — the oldest 21 when this volume starts, the youngest just 1 year old and about to be abandoned after yet another divorce.

As previous biographers have discovered, it’s difficult to write an endearing biography of Bellow. “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Bellow inquired on his deathbed. Leader put the question on the first page of Volume 1, and it bookends this two-volume opus. Nevertheless, he has managed to write a sympathetic, judicious, 700-page second volume here, which one can recommend on its own merits. I even came to admire Bellow more at the end than the beginning. How on earth did Leader do it?

One means is those sons. I found myself reading for the reappearances of Gregory Bellow, Adam Bellow and Daniel Bellow, who are richly realized as characters and emerge as thoughtful commenters on their father’s life. The sons’ humiliations climax with the oldest, Gregory’s, tumultuous speech at a luncheon after Bellow accepted the Nobel Prize. He announced, generously, that he finally realized his father loved him after all, but his father’s way of loving was to work so hard and single-mindedly. Bellow, rather than embrace his firstborn, walked in front of the crowd to his middle son, Adam, shook his hand, and said: “‘Thanks, kid, for not saying anything.’ And off he went, in a stretch limo, entourage at his side.”

Equally vibrant are the characterizations of the adult women who intersected with Bellow. Two of his five wives, Alexandra Tulcea and Janis Freedman, sat for wide-ranging interviews and come through admirably. So do many women Bellow dated in the 1960s and 1970s. The celebrated writer kept romances alive in different cities, two or three at any given time — with students and faculty divorcées at the University of Chicago, assistants at The New Yorker, even his housecleaner. Half a century later, women like Maggie Staats and Arlette Landes are affectionate but frank in remembering the half-liberated ’60s milieu, and make the otherwise dreary train of affairs surprisingly captivating. The same incidents come to us through different eyes, immediately and in retrospect. From Bellow’s archives, Leader might quote a letter in which Bellow described the frenetic writing of “Mosby’s Memoirs” while on vacation in Oaxaca in 1969: “I was in a state of all but intolerable excitement, or was, as the young now say, ‘turned on.’ A young and charming friend typed the manuscript for me.” But then he can give us the benefit of that friend’s memories, too: As Staats describes it, “Mosby’s Memoirs” is about “the humor that can be derived” from screwing someone over, “and the consequences of doing so.” (Leader adds: “When asked what Bellow’s attitude was to such behavior, she replied ‘mixed.’”)

This is a social or “crowd” biography of a quietly provocative kind. It is brilliantly calibrated to explore Bellow’s own central theme as a novelist: the conflict between solitary genius and the constraints of community. The latter, Bellow ambivalently portrayed in his novels as the “potato love” of the family, the “humanity bath” of the streets, and the rough-edged, criminal temptations of the 20th-century city.

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The vein that successfully keeps one focused on Bellow, and enchanted, is the novelist’s excerpted prose. It knocks you back on your heels. Not just in the novels and stories, but in letters to every sort of addressee, from intimates, to fans, to politicians, Bellow’s prose is electric.

I have always found Bellow’s artfulness to cloy over the length of his longest novels. He made himself a fiction writer by force of mind, hard work and sheer will, plus study of the greats. He remained a lifelong student of the highest caliber: co-teaching with philosophers, metabolizing esoteric doctrines, even directing the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. (By all accounts he was an elegant, sensible, fair administrator and exceptionally respectful boss to all employees and subordinates.) The level of planning and strain in his greatness, especially once the Bellow “voice” is set (by “Herzog,” surely), can be fatiguing.

Leader finds Bellow out in his letters, unpublished manuscripts and published books, and pulls gems into the light. The surprise and treat of this book is how much Bellow stayed a master, sentence by sentence, every time he picked up a pen.

The biography also reveals the full extent of the autobiographical dimension in his method of composing. Bellow didn’t just model some main characters on famous friends. We’ve long known about that. It seems that if he wanted to realize any side character, too — one who wasn’t working well as the transcription of one real person he knew — Bellow would try the character again, substituting a different acquaintance. He kept reworking an unpublished book in the 1990s: In one version, “the model for Hilbert Faucil was no longer Nathan Tarcov. Now it was Philip Roth”; “Roth hadn’t worked out as a starting point for Hilbert; now he was considering Arthur Lidov”; “Four months later … the model for Hilbert has become Lou Sidran, Bellow’s friend from high school.”

Leader goes back to investigate the truth of each influence, with eye-popping results. He digs up the reality behind the vile young radical who taunts the professor-hero in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” and the racially charged Chicago murder case in “The Dean’s December,” and sits down to interview the source originals for minor characters.

It is given to Bellow’s granddaughter Juliet to put her finger on the element in his psychology that seems to have dominated Bellow’s character and complicated so many friendships and relations. “He was in many ways a very thoughtful and kind person, but I think his need to be the top dog, the best, was very deep.” The energy of one-upping his close friends, surviving them only to write affectionately about them in novels, let Bellow continue to produce new masterpieces despite the cosseting upholstery of his fame and fortune, all the way from “Humboldt’s Gift” (1975), about dead Delmore Schwartz, to “Ravelstein” (2000), about dead Allan Bloom, published when Bellow was 85.

This in the end is what wins one over to Bellow, in Leader’s portrayal, despite his tyrannies and impressive capacity for giving offense: how many individuals he held together (even when pushing them away), how much sociability he ruminated for art.

The iron in Bellow’s soul was that he craved love and experience, and learned to view them coldly, clinically. The writer Amos Oz recalled most vividly from his friendship with Bellow an exchange that they shared privately about death. “I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, but Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because death is such a crucial experience he wouldn’t want to miss it.”

Mark Greif is an associate professor of English at Stanford and the author, most recently, of the essay collection “Against Everything.”